Deep Under the Heart of Texas

Kevin Durkin • Jul 22, 2011

(We took on an unusual construction project at Heritage Restorations to build a cheese cave for Brazos Valley Cheese, another one of our Homestead Craftsmen companies. The finishing touch was a castle-like entry door into the cave made from our antique barn wood.)


An underground cave for aging cheese is the dream of most cheese makers. And so it was for us at Brazos Valley Cheese located at the Brazos de Dios community in central Texas. During the more than fifteen years we have been making cheese, we have talked about building a cheese cave with an old-world flavor that we could age our artisan cheeses in. Finally, last year, we began work on a new shop and cave, but the cave part was the first to be built since more aging space was our immediate need.


Up to this time we have aged our twenty or so different varieties of hard and soft cheeses in walk-in coolers. Aging cheese in Texas can be a real challenge especially in the summer when daytime high temperatures typically peak over 100 degrees, sometimes for weeks on end. Unlike building a cave at a more northern latitude, our ground temperature never gets low enough through the year to allow for a cave without supplementary refrigeration. But still, the advantages of a cave, versus a walk-in cooler, led us to break ground in November 2010 on the new cave. Though we researched other cave designs, we were somewhat on uncharted territory in a climate this warm, and knew that we would have to pay careful attention to insulation.


We expected to encounter rock not far beneath the surface and sure enough, at three feet down, we hit fractured limestone, which was easily broken up excavated to a depth of fifteen feet. The cave is basically a cement slab floor with cement block walls and an arched poured-concrete roof. This entire room was encased in a coating of closed cell spray foam with a vapor barrier covering it, along with French drains at the base and then back-filled and landscaped over. The interior measures 6,000 cubic feet and the interior walls have a stucco finish. The pine shelves in the cave hold 3,000 ten-to-twelve pound wheels of hard cheese. Thankfully, the temperature stays a constant 50 degrees with a rather moderately worked 2 ton cooler unit. And that’s in the heat of a Texas summer.


The cave will be accessible by an elevator inside the shop, in which we can lower carts of cheese. We will also have a brass fireman’s pole alongside the elevator to allow for a quick descent to the cave, instead of a walk-around to the stairs! For the public we have an insulated observation window at the bottom of the stairs, accessed from the outside of the shop. We topped the whole project off with a five-inch-thick insulated castle like door with its own skeleton key and wrought iron hinges that never fail to amuse visitors.

The Glen Barn

By Kevin Durkin • 02 Feb, 2023
Built c. 1870, the Glen barn is one of the largest barns ever built in New York State measuring forty feet wide by one hundred feet long. Heritage Restorations has restored over 200 barns from New York, and it is the largest barn that they have ever moved and rebuilt. The history of the Glen barn is a reflection of the great cultural changes that took place during the 1800’s in America.

The Barn Melting Pot

By Kevin Durkin • 02 Feb, 2023
I am often asked the question of where we get our barns. When I reply, “Mostly from New York,” I am then asked, aren’t there good barns in other states?

Old World Meets New

02 Feb, 2023
More than any other factor, what differentiated American timber framing from its predecessors in the Old World was when the Old World pioneers came to America, they were confronted with a very different building reality in that the materials they had on hand to build with, namely trees, were vastly different from their experience in Europe.

A Heritage Barn Story

02 Feb, 2023
In the fall of 1609, English explorer Henry Hudson sailed up the river that would later bear his name. He was in search of a westward passage to Asia, but as the water sweetened and became less salty, it became clear to them that this was not the passage they were seeking. It was fine land though, and he claimed it for his patrons, The Dutch West India Company.

Hand Crafted Water Wheel

02 Feb, 2023
In late 2012 a private golf course near Houston, Texas was in the process of a facility expansion including a new 9 hole-par three surrounding a small lake. The Owner, a creative visionary, imagined this required industrial pump-house building could be a feature rather than a distraction to the otherwise pristine short course.

Barn Raising in Japan

02 Feb, 2023
Heritage Restorations had the unique opportunity to raise one of our restored historic timber frames in Japan! We dismantled and restored an 1840’s timber frame barn from the tranquil fields of upstate New York and re-erected it in the bustling metropolis of Tokyo, Japan.

The Great Epizootic of 1872

By Kevin Durkin • 05 Jan, 2013
People often ask what interesting things we find in the centuries-old barns we dismantle for our barn restoration business. Well, there are a lot of interesting “things,” like the time we found an old pillowcase hidden in a corner of the first barn that we took down that was full of jewelry from a long-forgotten house burglary, and the time we found the bowling ball that my helper claims is the ball that old Rip Van Winkle used before he drank the potion that put him to sleep for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains.

Mott Gristmill

By Kevin Durkin • 05 Jan, 2013
There is something about gristmills and waterwheels that resonates with just about everyone. The gristmill is an American icon that evokes sentiments of home and community, as is evidenced in the gristmill pictures so many of us have in our homes.

Colonel Drake Saves the Whales

By Kevin Durkin • 25 Aug, 2012
From time to time, in my travels in the Northeast, I pass through the sleepy hamlet of Greenville, New York—just another rural American village on the landscape of formerly thriving agricultural communities. Over the last eighty years, such communities have undergone a relentless depopulating, as generations of young people abandoned their agrarian roots and made their ways to urban centers that offered more “economic opportunity.”

LaRue Barn

By Kevin Durkin • 25 Aug, 2012
We found the LaRue barn through a phone call from a woman in northern New Jersey who had heard about our work of moving and restoring barns. She wanted to know if we would possibly want to move an old barn that was in danger of being demolished to make way for a new suburban development.
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